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Monthly Archives: January 2012

This column is entirely about making you a well-rounded being. This means covering your appearance, your accent, stopping you from picking your nose, letting you in on what your workmates/classmates are saying behind your back and also giving you some vital skills. Today, like we’ve done before, we go into furthering your culinary skills. Your colleagues shouldn’t only be wowed when you say “Hey guys and girls, I know a sure-fire way that the SOPA and PIPA debacles can be resolved. Also, the Iran stand-off can be dealt with by…” They should also be wowed when you say “Listen-up guys and girls, I know I don’t look the part but I know how to prepare Espanooza Brugeli Mantozzo. I learnt by reading ‘By The Way’ in Sunday Monitor”.

Since that cat’s already out of the bag, it won’t hurt to re-iterate what we are going to learn how to prepare today. Espanooza Brugeli Mantozzo. As the name suggests, yes, it contains chicken. That name also hints that there should be mushrooms involved. To bring the chicken to tenderness (in culinary terms because strictly speaking, what are the chances that you’ll find an emotionally tender chicken?), it is essential that you chase it. Chase the chicken; past the flower garden, out the gate, through Mzee Kakulu’s elephant grass, back into your fence, past the kennel, past the kids stealing guavas, past the food on the sigiri, till it tires and surrenders. Because the dish we are preparing contains mushrooms, it is essential that the chicken you’ve been chasing surrenders in a mushroom garden. If it doesn’t, let it go. Go chase another chicken.

Ingredients

Tender chicken that surrendered in a mushroom garden

Salt

2 shots of Gilbeys

Directions

Chicken captured (as detailed in the run-up above), pluck its feathers, cut it open and remove all the parts that we don’t eat. Then cut it into generous pieces

Warm some oil and when it starts to stink-up the house, drop the chicken pieces in it together with several mushrooms, three tablespoons of salt, one whole onion, two whole tomatoes and a touch of vinegar.

Wait till the chicken turns alpha golden brown then remove it.

The shots of Gilbeys were for you. Drink them

Nutritional Information (Amount Per Serving): Calories: Enough to make you a kick-boxer | Cholesterol: A lot

Many times in our adult life, we find ourselves plagued by self-doubt. As children, things like whether our favourite pink shirt matched our favourite purple trousers and mauve shoes didn’t bother us; ok, I stand corrected. It turns out certain people were fashion-enthusiasts even as babies and cried more from mummy forcing them to wear diapers with polka-dots than they did when they were terribly hungry. That said, one ‘adult’ thing we didn’t worry about, even all those children who grew up too fast and learnt the power of carefully-timed tears, was whether we were a good neighbour or not.

As adults, we spend many of our waking hours wondering whether we are good neighbours. We wonder whether we are nice to the people next door (Or the animals, depending on where you live). I’m here to save you the time so you can use it to worry about inflation and GDP. Take the good neighbour test below and see how many points you score. It is a simple test; good neighbours have at least some of the things below.

Extra generator

Neighbour points: Seven

In these dark times, you need to look out for others. Get it? Because it’s dark, so you need to look out for them lest you bump into them? Ok, lame joke. But seriously, when your neighbour comes to you asking to borrow a candle, give them a generator.

Oven

Neighbour points: Four

In Uganda, it is an age-old tradition to bake brownies for new neighbours. I have seen this many times on TV but I’m pretty sure it was copied from here originally; like in 1932. I have it on very good authority that our great grandparents used to do it. The god authority said that much as there were no ovens, the brownies were made by improvising with flat irons. When a new person moves in next door, use the oven and grandma’s secret brownie recipe to make enough brownies to feed an army of hungry ants. March there and present the brownies with a smile.

If you scored more than five neighbour points, you are a great neighbour.

This column is all about suggesting, sometimes in strong terms, practical ways of making your life better. And easier. And making you that person that people’s eyes brighten around, not because of the copious amounts of alcohol they’ve been chugging down but because of how people are fascinated by your company. Taxi drivers, the butcher, boda boda riders, your boss, your lecturer…they all involuntarily lean in when you take a seat next to them and eat up everything you say.

So to further this agenda, the writer of this column is going to talk about love. He also knows only too well that you did all kinds of justice to more than generous portions of fruits, vegetables and all kinds of unhealthy food during the last two weeks. So much as love is the general topic today, in particular, he is going to talk about love handles. If probed further, he’d reveal that he’s actually going to deal with how to get rid of the love handles you developed over the last two weeks.

For those not well-versed in matters of the gut, love handles are those bits of extra flesh we now all have at the side of our belly. All websites I visited insisted that one has to go to the gym to get rid of them. I’d hoped for a less strenuous solution, like staring intently at people working out on TV, but nature is rather cruel.

So yes, a trip to the gym is what we all need this month. Now I’m told gyms have a very strict dress code and code of conduct. For one, you cannot just show up in a suit no matter who you are. Many of my friends who are lawyers have shown up in those nice, fitting suits that lawyers wear, ready to sweat it out only to be turned away at the door. I feel their pain. I’m all for ‘wear-what-you-want-to-the-gym’. I think that with the attitude that these people who turn away those in suits, our beloved country will never see development. What happened to love, care, tolerance, acceptance and then sniggering behind people’s backs after? Why should a man/woman, after a long, hard day (or even one spent chewing gum and sticking the over-chewed pieces under workmates’ desks) at work be turned away when they get to the gym just because of what they are wearing? I think gyms do not care about love in general and love handles in particular.

The beautiful New Year is here and the flowers and frowns of 2011 have already been handed out. The beauty about a new year is that we generally start it super-charged, willing the sun to shine brighter, whistling Westlife ballads and holding onto a yellowish, crumpled paper on which we hastily scribbled all our resolutions for the year. A leading research firm I stumbled upon in Bwaiise revealed that a resolution that tops several lists is ‘To be famous’. According to Horace Brown Kasibante (no ID was presented, so may not be his real name), a lead researcher at the firm, “So many people want to be famous. But think about it, if they all became famous, then who would remain to watch them, be jealous and spread rumors about them? Who would the commoners be?”

That said, if their research is anything to go by, I present to you a full-proof way to make sure you book your fifteen minutes of fame this year. It is said that no one should spend their entire life without having made at least one headline. In a country like ours, you are spoilt for choice on how to go about it. Also, considering that some theories and entire movies suggest that the world is ending this year, I don’t think it is fair that one doesn’t get a chance to have his/her name in big print or just have their picture published with a light caption like ‘omg, she’s having a good time. Lol’. See that person on TV saying ‘tukooye so..so..sausage’? That could be you. See that person winning an eating competition? That could be you. Below, I present a quick way to make headlines.

Go to the bank and get your savings; or get a loan. Banks have a loan for everything these days. Get the money in small denominations, (preferably one thousand shilling notes) and a few coins. That done, position yourself favorably in a bar of choice. Give the DJ a signal and when the music stops, stand on a table-top and start investing in your future as a star by letting out a shrill scream while you shower revelers with your money. Be careful when hurling the coins lest you hurt people and get thrown out. Your debut at the top can’t start with a black eye otherwise the newspapers which run the story about your feat will christen you ‘Black eye’; that is not a catchy name for the famous person that you now are. Be sure to mention me in your interviews; I was kind enough to give you a free tip.